This invention relates generally to the field of retail sales and marketing, and particularly to the organization and arrangement of merchandise items to facilitate their display and sale. More specifically, the invention provides systems, structures and methods for physically segregating items of different types while maximizing both physical and visual access to each of the item types.
In the modern retail environment, customers desire to select their purchases from a wide variety of merchandise items. At the same time, customers desire to have such items all in close proximity. Evidence of this fact is found throughout the United States where the most popular shopping environments are malls, strip malls, and the like.
Most malls in the United States have a small number of relatively large department stores and numerous smaller specialty stores. Typically, spacious hallways run along the outside of the specialty stores and terminate at the entrances to the department stores. Such hallways are the “arteries” of the mall and provide customers with a convenient external access to the specialty stores and the department stores. Although most department stores will also have their own external entrances, the specialty stores will typically provide external access to customers only through the hallways.
Conventional department stores, such as Dillards, Macy's and the like, have a wide assortment of items under a single roof. The items are typically organized into randomly arranged “departments.” The boundaries of such “departments” are typically defined by an aisle or by a separate floor within the building.
The typical strip mall includes several specialty stores which are built adjacent each other. A sidewalk usually runs past the front entrance to each of the stores. In this way, once a customer has finished shopping in one store, she may exit the store, walk outside along the sidewalk, and enter into another store.
Such malls and strip malls as described above suffer from a number of serious drawbacks. For example, many malls have included such a vast number of stores that it is impractical to browse through every store in a single shopping trip. Indeed, the walking distance between all of the stores can easily exceed one-half of a mile in many of the larger malls. To even the most hearty of shoppers, this can make the shopping experience inconvenient and frustrating. Furthermore, since a single external hallway typically interconnects each of the stores, shopping traffic can become congested and make access to the stores difficult.
The arrangement of most department stores can also make the shopping experience frustrating. The “departments” are typically highly fractionized so that finding a particular item may entail searching through various “departments” which are usually poorly marked and are scattered about the store, often on separate floors.
A significant drawback to strip malls is that the merchandise usually differs vastly from store to store. For example, one store may be a pet store, the next a bagel store, and the next a video store. Hence, a customer shopping for a particular group of retail items, such as various household items, may have to visit several strip malls to find the appropriate stores. Another drawback to such strip malls is that a customer must leave a store and walk outside in order to enter another store. This can be especially inconvenient during inclement weather or when shopping with children.
Hence, it would be desirable to provide customers with a wide variety of merchandise items while overcoming or greatly reducing the drawbacks associated with previously proposed retailing schemes. In particular, it would be desirable to have items of different types segregated and clearly organized to allow customers to easily locate a desired item. Further, it would be desirable if physical access to each type of item were optimized to allow customers to conveniently access and browse through a particular group of items.